


to know the worth of my life

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: A teensy bit of James/Thomas, Bible Quotes, First Kiss, Fix-It, M/M, Names, Post-Series, Season/Series 04, Some Silver/Madi, The focus is Silver/Flint though, Treasure Island? What Treasure Island?, Unfortunately not a single dick joke to be found anywhere in this, maybe next time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:36:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: So big a name for so small a man.John Silver feels very small.





	to know the worth of my life

“Little.”

He _hates_ being called that, the way the name trips out from mouths carelessly, the twin t’s swallowed by rough voices into an abrupt silence that cleaves the word so that it comes out as “Lih-ull”. A worthless, accidental smear of a word, like dirt trampled underfoot. It’s usually spat out amidst laughter, just before fists pummel him. _“Hey, Little. Oi, you little ugly fuck.”_

But this particular voice, the way it calls him, tongue hard against teeth on the t’s—it gives the name weight, like a coin in a pocket. Something that tinkles and gleams, something that will put warm bread in his belly.

He spins around, joy in his veins as if he can smell the fresh-baked bread, soft and white and still steaming in the chill morning air. But then everything goes wrong, devoured by a darkness that screams itself hoarse, a searing agony that strikes him over and over.

He wakes, gasping. In his dream the punches had felt so real. The blood in his mouth had tasted like a coin. It had not only been his own blood.

He wraps his arm tight around Madi’s waist and presses himself closer against the heat of her back. “John,” she murmurs, like a tree sighing in the wind.

His heart thuds in his chest. He hadn’t wanted ever to love anyone again, but here he is. 

* * *

“Long John Silver,” Max says. “So big a name for so small a man.”

He _feels_ small. He had always been a small man, and then he had come across a cook with a priceless schedule and reinvented himself as John Silver. John is inconspicuous, ordinary, bland. Hell, half of England’s called John. Silver, on the other hand, tinkles and gleams. Precious, valued.

He agrees with Max: it is too big a name for him. It was so even before Billy took it upon himself to add a prefix of magnitude to it.

He remembers crawling on the sand last night, dragging his useless body up the beach on his elbows, trying to get away from the hulking, shadowy figure with the axe even as he knew how futile it was. Half-sobbing with panic and blind with fear. He had been so _small_. Just a tiny fish floundering in the mire, amongst corpses. Unable to do anything to avoid being beheaded and scaled and gutted like the fish Hands had fed him today, its pink flesh squelching under the knife.

His wrists bound above his head, his arms aching and his cheek sore from Hands’ punch, he could not be but little again. Hurting and abandoned. _I’m no one, from nowhere, belonging to nothing._

Yesterday he had been with Flint. Yesterday he had spoken of calling Nassau home again, as if it had ever been his home in the first place. It had been Flint’s home for ten years. But John had never lived in Nassau. Yet he had started to dream of it as his home, too.

The day Flint first started teaching him to fence on the Maroon Island, he’d been staring into the distance when Silver arrived at the clifftop. When asked what he was looking at, he’d answered, “Nassau. Thereabouts. A few days over the horizon, just waiting for us. Can’t you see it?” 

_Just waiting for us._

John later wondered, as they took a few minutes to sit on the grass and catch their breath after an hour of clanging swords, “When the war is through, what do you mean to do?”

“I’ll go back to the house that Miranda and I shared, and I’ll live out the rest of my days there.” Flint gazed earnestly at the sea as if he could see the house there on the glimmering surface of the water, as clearly as he claimed to be able to see Nassau. John had never been to this house, but he wanted to see it. He thought of living there, with Flint, with Madi, but he could not hold the vision in his head. It was smudged, like ink on soaked paper. But it was there, where the paper had previously been blank.

He had never had a home. When he looked at the sea then on that clifftop, he thought only of the battle that they had fought a week prior, the triumphant conclusion of it, Flint striding down the bank on the other side of the lake, his face streaked with blood.

That was what John saw when he squinted at the ocean, even though Flint was right beside him.

Across every body of water is Flint, waiting for him.

Is that belonging? Does he belong?

But right here, right now, with Max rejecting his demands, with his expectations dashed and scattered in the night, he is no one. Just a unsightly stain that needs to be washed out to preserve civilisation’s pristine white fabric. Hands kills three of Max’s men before John finally gathers his wits enough to shoot one.

He watches as Max flees. He is so very fucking small indeed.

* * *

The house is a bleak ruin, the stone black with soot, the roof half collapsed, the inside of it all cooled ashes and cracked tiles and charred timber.

Madi had nearly died here.

She is here with him now. She led him here, when he asked. She tells him of her experience of the house in the brief time she spent here before it was destroyed, of the weapons and plans and the stink of men that had choked the place, how Billy’s revolution had drawn a pall over everything, had eaten up the house just as much as the fire had now consumed it. “I imagine it must have been a very different place, once,” Madi says. “I would have liked to see it when Lady Hamilton was alive and took care of the place. The melodies that might have floated from the clavichord. The poetry she filled the emptiness with. The perfumes she used, the delicate fragrances of the teas she brewed.”

“You saw it before it was burnt,” John says, quietly. “Would you have liked to live here?”

Madi considers this. “I have always thought of a home as a place you make with the people you love,” she says. “You don’t want to know if I would have liked to live here. You want to know if _you_ could have lived here.”

He winces. Yes. He wants to belong. He thought he would belong here, before he had ever even been here. The house in his mind was a mirage, and he a desert traveller, thirsting. The desert is still there, ever so expansive, and the mirage has flickered out of sight.

_I see a life for myself with her._

Must all attempts to make a home end in this? In something that crumbles away in your hands into black dust?

Wherever he touches, the charcoal leaves its mark on his palms. The house is sticking to him, painting his skin. He kneels, brushing through the debris for he knows not what.

He finds a shard of porcelain and blows on it, wipes it on his trousers until it shows white. It is already something broken, but, being porcelain, it doesn’t flake and melt in his hands like everything else. Its edges are sharp enough to cut.

Behind him, Madi snorts. “Would you believe he did this too?”

John turns around. “What?”

“Picked up a fragment of a teacup and cradled it in his hand, examining it as if it were a map,” Madi says. “For him, a map that showed the way to the undiscovered country where he might follow Thomas and Miranda and you, when he thought you and Thomas both dead.” John’s breath hitches. “As for you, well. _You_ tell me what path you are so desperate for this map to reveal to you.”

Her gaze is so fierce and measuring as always. He is flayed by it.

“I want it to show me the way home,” he says, and squeezes his eyes shut when Madi crouches down before him and touches a gentle hand to his cheek.

* * *

The sun is low in the sky to his right as he approaches the cottage. It is the most idyllic picture he has ever seen, the honeyed bricks of the cottage gilded by the late afternoon sun, fronted by bushes of purple and pink flowers and flanked by leafy green trees, and before it a placid, shallow stream, with smooth, flat stones forming a bridge of sorts across it.

He stops, nervous. Madi puts a hand on his shoulder.

The cream-coloured door opens then, as if in a dream, and Flint steps out. Loose white shirt over ivory breeches, as if he has only just stumbled out of bed at this hour, when the sun is near setting. His hair growing back and glowing carnelian in this light. He sees John and Madi, and his mouth falls open. Then he stands up straighter, squaring his shoulders, tugging uneasily at the hem of his shirt.

There he is, just across the stream.

A neat file of stones will take John across to him.

He cannot move. He watches as Madi goes first, her steps falling sure and determined on each stone. She goes up to Flint and he smiles at her and hugs her. They talk, and John cannot hear what they are saying. They glance at him.

Madi leaves Flint and enters the cottage.

John has come this far. Only a stream to cross, and he will be at Flint’s side. Only two dozen steps, give or take, and he will be able to learn the particular shade of Flint’s eyes in this moment.

He walks forward, and he crosses the stream, steady with his crutch. It is surprisingly easy, once he starts moving, and then he is there, only an arm’s length away from Flint. He wants to hug Flint like Madi did, but he does not know if that will be welcome. He reaches out for Flint’s hand instead, a smaller gesture, and Flint does not shrink from him. 

“Silver,” Flint says, voice thick. His eyes are moss-soft and the same lush green.

John thought he was tired of the name he chose for himself: it is stolen jewellery. The way Flint says it, though, reminds him of its value. Still, he wants to give Flint a true piece of himself, if only as a start, as a pledge that he will do better.

“That’s not my real name,” he says, thrilling at the warmth of Flint’s hand clasped in his and summoning confidence from it. “I made that up the same day I joined your crew.”

“I hope you’re saying this because you actually intend to tell me your real name,” Flint says, his lips quirking into an uncertain smile.

“I know I refused to tell you of my past before,” John says. “And I asked you to trust me despite it, and you gave your trust to me. But I realise I have splintered that trust badly, and while I am aware that I’m not going to mend it simply by telling you my real name, I hope—I hope you’ll understand how much this means to me.”

Flint nods. “Go on.”

“My real name is Solomon Little.” He sees Flint’s eyes widen in recognition of the times he has heard that name woven into various stories that John has told. “Little, they called me. I was a joke. A runt. A weak piece of shit they could treat however they liked.” For now, he keeps private the memory of the only person who had ever uttered that name with sweetness and affection, the way other people might say ‘darling’. “When I saw the opportunity of a new life available to me with that schedule that I stole, I took on a different name. Something rich and exciting. Something ever-changing, too.”

Flint strokes John’s hair, just behind his ear. “Silver,” he says, as if savouring it for the last time, the sibilance of it, the cold-metal hush of it. Then, testing the shape of it on his tongue: “Solomon Little.” He tilts his head. “You say you had to get rid of that for a more rich and exciting name, but Solomon is only the wealthiest and wisest king in the Bible.”

A breathless grin slips onto John’s face without his having any say in the matter. “Of course that’s what you think of immediately,” he says.

“He wrote the _Proverbs_ ,” Flint says. “ _These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren._ ”

John’s brow raises itself almost involuntarily. “Oh yes, why not just: _These two things doth the Lord hate: John Silver and James Flint._ ”

Flint smiles, widely. “But he also wrote the _Song of Solomon_ , which Thomas still likes to quote in bed far too often.” His cheeks reflect the deepening dusk, and John’s heart pounds bold and loud, jealous and curious at the same time. “ _My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone._ ”

He looks into John’s eyes. His thumb rubs carefully over John’s cheekbone, and then he kisses John, and it tastes like spring, like the sky forgiving the earth. John throws his arms around Flint, unable to bear it any longer; he wants to cling to Flint for the rest of his life. He wants to belong. He wants to always come home to Flint in this cottage just across a beautiful stream of clear water.

Their mouths part for a moment, John holding onto the nape of Flint’s neck as he tries to smother the tears that threaten at the corners of his eyes, looking at the nebulae of freckles that swirl on Flint’s chest, visible through the open collar of his shirt.

Behind Flint, John sees the front door open again, and Madi and a man who must be Thomas stand in the threshold, waiting.

“I think perhaps you were always meant to be my king,” Flint says. He lifts John’s hand to his lips and presses a kiss to John’s knuckles, and it makes John feel heavy with delight, like all his pockets are weighed down full to the brim with coins. “Solomon.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sleeping At Last - Mercury.
> 
> Comments are really appreciated! <3 Come find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) where I'm going to be crying over Black Sails forever.
> 
> And do check out the wonderful podfic recorded by inkgeek at the link below!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [to know the worth of my life [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11697675) by [mapped](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped), [ponytailflint (inkgeek)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkgeek/pseuds/ponytailflint)




End file.
